Enteral tube-feeding (ETF) of foods are designed to provide nutrition for seriously ill patients who cannot feed themselves. Such seriously ill patients include patients who are suffered from strokes, comatose, brain injury, etc. The benefits of ETF nutrition in critically ill patients are well known that include maintenance of caloric intake, health, the functional and structural integrity of the gut, decreased infectious complications, shorter hospital stays, and lower mortality. Often, tube feeding patients experienced more days with elevated gastric residual volume (GRV), constipation, vomiting, diarrhea, reflux, aspiration, abdominal distention, or cramping.
Because of the conditions of the patients, enteral tube-feeding (EFT) foods are made in form of liquid so that they can provide sufficient caloric intake in order to maintain the patient's health and resistance to illnesses. Even though worldwide medical food market has provided food formulas served these purposes, the majority of the food formulas is a composition based on well-known chemical elements such as glucose, maltodextrin, fructose, premade carbohydrate, nitrite casemate, or calcium casemate, amino acid, protein, and other milk products. These pre-processed food ingredients are expensive and lack of natural nutrients contained in foods. Moreover, a few pre-processed composite food formulas have high absorption pressure that can cause a prolonged bout of diarrhea and dehydration. In addition, the consumption of dairy foods or products rich in lactose found in milk can cause people with lactose intolerance severe indigestion and diarrhea.
Before the conventional commercial tube-feeding foods described above are available in the world market, families, loved ones, nurses, and nutrition department in hospitals often prepared different sorts of pureed soups for seriously ill patients. These pureed soups are still used in hospitals in many parts of the world. However, these pureed soups have no standards for patients with the same illness because they are prepared by different hospitals, different families with different formulas and cooking styles. Furthermore, these pureed soups are not subject to stringent quality controls. Therefore, they have different nutrition qualities and a short spoilage time. Commercial food processing machines, blenders, juicers, etc. can grind food ingredients into fine morsels. However, without being subject to a hydrolysis processing, these foods suffer from problems such as low homogenization and high viscosity. As a consequence, these foods cannot pass through the feeding tubes, which chokes and lowers the digestion capability of the patients. These problems are especially severe in patients who are seriously weak, having malfunctioning digestive system, and lacking of digestive enzymes.
In many developing countries like Vietnam, tube-feeding foods manufactured from natural ingredients that meet medical and nutritional standards have not been developed. There are a few companies that manufacture tube-feeding foods for patients. However, the proteins contained in these foods are made from vegetables mixed with assorted imported materials. Therefore, they are expensive and do not have any nutrition standards for the same type of patients suffering from the same illness.
Therefore what is needed is tube-feeding medical foods and process of manufacturing the same that achieve food tolerance, meet nutritional requirements, inexpensive, and avoid serious side effects such as abdominal distention, gastroesophageal reflux, diarrhea, etc.